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Edna O’Brien was a winner of the Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award, a member of the IBA hall of fame, and a leading light for a generation of Irish writers. Her loss will have a profound impact on the Irish literary scene.
In November 2009, Seamus Heaney presented Edna with her Lifetime Achievement Award in a speech that contained this moving tribute:
“This is not the moment to go into a review of her career, book by book. Suffice it to say that she has been a writer with an undeflected sense of vocation, and a deep awareness of the example set by her local heroes, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Like them, Edna O’Brien has been a worker in the smithy of the soul, a worker with staying power, ready to keep going and go on, no matter what. But she has also been ready – again like Joyce and indeed Yeats – ready to work not only in the smithy of the soul but in the sweet salon of the body, ready and even eager to give a full and true account of the sensual music and the sexual life. Constantly and courageously she has celebrated desire and the transports of love in the flesh, and has been ready also to trace their painful consequences. Ready, like the hero of her most recent book, Lord Byron, to give free rein to her perceptions, give exhilarated voice to her experience and give scandal to whoever needs to be scandalized. So let me turn again to Yeats, to a line he wrote about Maud Gonne, a line which says simply, ‘She is foremost of those I would hear praised.’ For just as Maud Gonne entered Yeats’s dream life and never left it, so Edna O’Brien long ago entered our dream life as individual readers; but equally importantly she also entered and influenced our collective cultural imagination.”